The Spook School are that rare and beautiful thing: a band with something to say. This “trans queer pop punk band” from Edinburgh have coded their second album, Try to Be Hopeful, with a specific message: celebrate diversity, ignore boundaries of sexuality and gender, be yourself and, crucially, have fun with it. The quartet make breezy, cute indie-pop fused to the bouncy punk of the Buzzcocks and Undertones. They take their message seriously, but flood their music with joy.

Spook School formed in 2012 when brothers Nye and Adam Todd went looking for a rhythm section for the songs they’d written, meeting bassist Anna Corey and drummer Niall McCamley through Edinburgh university’s comedy society. A grant from Creative Scotland led to a demo, which caught the attention of cult label Fortuna POP!, home to Darren Hayman, Tender Trap and the Primitives.

Why let yourself be limited to binary desires?

It was a natural fit: label founder Sean Price made contact in an email so modest it was typed entirely in lowercase, while at their first meeting the Todd brothers were so shy they walked in front of him, let their bandmates do all the talking and consequently didn’t know what their label boss looked like for months.

That shyness has never been a problem though, partly as gregarious drummer McCamley can talk enough for all four of them, but mostly because there’s real fire behind their low-key personas, much of it from Nye, who has been undergoing gender transition throughout the group’s lifetime. The band share songwriting responsibilities, but Nye’s growing confidence in his identity has defined their ethos.

Touring their debut album, 2013’s Dress Up, drew them into a community of outspoken queer musicians, gigging with acts like Martha and Kinky, and touring the US where they met trans icon Laura Jane Grace. The reinforcement of like-minded souls made them determined to embrace their identities more openly in their music. “By the time we were writing this album, we’d met a lot of cool people on the queer punk scene and realised we liked hearing songs overtly about that,” says bassist Corey. “We wanted to be open about it too.”

The four friends would pass books between them – Julie Serano’s Whipping Girl, Shiri Eisner’s Bi: Notes for A Bisexual Revolution and Bell Hooks’s Feminism Is for Everybody.

The album’s lead single, Burn Masculinity, explores Nye’s complex relationship with male identity, while Binary celebrates the scope of human sexual life. “You are not a computer, you are complex and undefined,” sings Nye, “so why let yourself be limited to binary desires?” There’s a punch-the-air energy to these songs, a positivity that must mean the world to the band’s fanbase of misfits and outsiders: songs that celebrate them.

It all starts with celebrating yourself. “When we started I wasn’t perceived as male very often,” says Nye, “I found it more distressing to be constantly misgendered than any distress I’d have from standing up and saying ‘hey, I’m trans’. Now [that’s changed and] I feel my identity is something I get strength from.”